The Complete Guide to Using AI in the Retail Industry in Italy in 2025

Italy's retail leaders in 2025 face a clear imperative: AI is no longer experimental but central to winning customers and cutting costs - consumers are growing more open to brands using AI and nearly half say they'd use generative tools to research purchases, so Italian merchants must meet rising expectations for hyper-personalization, seamless service, and resilient supply chains as described in recent industry analysis like AskAttest 2025 Consumer Adoption of AI report and the OpenText briefing on how AI is reshaping retail; practical moves - demand forecasting, dynamic pricing, and automated service - turn complex operations into competitive advantage, while new delivery and store automation trends accelerate omnichannel performance.

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“AI means the end of internet search as we've known it”

Italy's big retail story for 2025 is twofold: steady digital demand meets an accelerating AI wave, and together they're reshaping how stores sell, stock and serve - e‑commerce is projected to grow 6% to more than €62 billion (with services up 8% to €22 billion and product sales topping €40 billion), while fashion still drives more than a fifth of online revenue and mobile commerce now accounts for over a third of orders (roughly €7 billion driven by 35–44 year‑olds), so omnichannel and mobile-first experiences are non‑negotiable for Italian retailers (Italia Trend 2025: Top E‑commerce & Food Innovations).

At the same time AI adoption has surged - one survey shows usage jumping from 12% to 46% in a year, with managers reporting clear cost and revenue benefits (EY Italy AI Barometer) - and studies estimate 63% of large firms are already adopting or planning AI, with a potential productivity upside of about €115 billion across the economy (Minsait: Artificial Intelligence in Italy 2025).

The practical “so what?”: retailers who pair data‑driven merchandising, CRM and mobile checkout with targeted AI pilots - from demand forecasting to chatbots and personalized marketing - can cut waste and win loyalty, but success hinges on closing skills gaps, building governance and scaling use cases rather than chasing hype; imagine a shop floor where shelves are refilled on AI‑timed schedules and a customer's mobile feed shows locally relevant Italian shoes at the exact moment they're most likely to buy.

“GenAI is definitely one of our clients' top technological priorities,” says Davide Antonazzo, Director at AlixPartners.

Italy's national AI strategy for 2024–2026 deliberately turns policy into practical fuel for retailers: it pairs funding and SME support with infrastructure, procurement rules and training so shops can adopt interoperable, Italy‑centric AI rather than bolt on foreign tools.

The plan foregrounds a business pillar that offers dedicated funding, industrial labs and incentives to help small and medium enterprises modernise core systems (data, inventory and customer engagement), while measures on infrastructure - notably a national repository of datasets and models - and a proposed Artificial Intelligence Foundation aim to lower barriers to entry and simplify certification and procurement.

The strategy also aligns national lawmaking with the EU AI Act and includes reskilling and upskilling programmes to close talent gaps in retail teams, plus guidelines for public tenders that should make partnerships between retailers, universities and ICT firms smoother.

For any Italian retailer thinking about pilots or scaling, the message is clear: available grants, shared datasets and procurement pathways are now part of the toolkit - treat them as strategic levers, not just compliance tasks (see the official Italian AI Strategy (AgID) and a concise legal briefing from DLA Piper legal briefing on Italy's AI Strategy 2024–2026 implementation and funding for implementation details and funding directions).

“The strategy drafted by the Committee frames artificial intelligence as a concrete driver of development for our country, enhancing our peculiarities and promoting the development and adoption of transparent and reliable solutions, in line with our values,” said Committee Coordinator Prof. Gianluigi Greco.

The industry outlook for AI in Italy in 2025 is a story of fast market growth but patchy adoption: the national AI market is on a steep climb - projected to double from about €909 million in 2024 to roughly €1.8 billion by 2027 - driven by heavy investments in banking, telecoms and a surging manufacturing use case pipeline (Anitec‑Assinform and Rinnovabili AI market forecast for Italy (2024–2027)); at the same time, large firms report rapid uptake and tangible gains - Minsait finds 63% of large companies are adopting or planning AI, with an aggregate productivity upside estimated at around €115 billion - yet national surveys also highlight a clear divide, with only single‑digit AI use reported among all enterprises in 2024 and much lower SME adoption, so momentum and readiness are uneven across regions and firm sizes (Minsait report: Artificial Intelligence in Italy 2025 - adoption and impacts).

The practical implication for Italian retail IT teams is obvious: a growing vendor and startup ecosystem (hundreds of specialised firms) and rising sector investment create opportunity, but winners will be the retailers who pair investments in skills, data plumbing and cloud/edge infrastructure with focused pilots - picture a logistics dashboard that reroutes a local delivery in real time when AI spots demand spikes - and then scale the proven wins across stores and channels.

“Our goal is to amplify the voice of ICT companies that face market challenges daily. To accelerate AI development, we need a strategy that integrates three key elements: fostering digital skills in education, enhancing advanced computing infrastructure, and strengthening public‑private partnerships,” said Massimo Dal Checco, president of Anitec‑Assinform.

Key AI use cases for retail in Italy in 2025 cluster around personalization, smarter operations and seamless omnichannel experiences: hyper‑personalized recommendations and targeted email/social feeds - backed by a booming personalization market that pushed Italy's AI industry past €1.2 billion with a 58% YoY rise in early 2025 - drive higher engagement and loyalty (Italy AI personalization market report 2025 (Market Research Future)); predictive analytics and demand forecasting cut waste and stockouts while optimizing staffing and micro‑fulfilment, a practical win for perishable grocery and fashion assortments; customer data platforms that unify first‑party data are now the backbone of true omnichannel journeys and real‑time triggers like click‑and‑collect upsells or location‑aware offers (Customer Data Platform and omnichannel retail trends 2025 (Treasure Data)); in‑store automation - computer vision for shelf monitoring, electronic shelf labels and cashierless checkout - lowers labour costs and enables dynamic pricing; and conversational/localized generative models (including recent Italian releases) speed multilingual customer service and store‑level personalization.

These uses converge: imagine a mobile feed that surfaces a regionally stocked leather shoe, timed to coincide with an AI‑predicted weekend spike, while a CDP triggers an in‑store discount - small technical moves that translate into noticeable revenue gains and less wasted inventory.

For practical guidance, follow vendor and trend playbooks that pair pilots with data plumbing and CDP integrations (Top retail technology trends 2025 (ARirms)).

“In the most simple terms, this is about delivering a seamless experience across all the touch points. It's about having your brand show up very consistently across all channels, whether it's email, social media, SMS, or an app push.” - Art Sebastian

Start with a focused, IT‑led readiness sprint: a four‑week AI Readiness Assessment can map data quality, infrastructure gaps, governance and talent needs and deliver a prioritized roadmap tailored to retail operations (RSM's four‑week engagement is a practical template for this), because while many Italian firms are already moving - Minsait reports 63% of large companies adopting or planning AI and a potential €115bn productivity upside - readiness lags and scaling without a plan wastes time and budget.

Use benchmark tools like the F5 AI Readiness Index to quantify where infrastructure, security and operational controls fall short (the industry finds widespread model use but only a tiny share are “highly ready”), and heed Arm's readiness signals around strategy, compute scalability and security when designing pilots.

Run compact, measurable pilots that target supply‑chain or last‑mile wins and CDP or forecasting proofs of value, instrumenting KPIs and rollback controls so IT can harden deployment patterns quickly; only after repeatable gains and secure, autoscaling compute are proven should retailers roll models across stores and channels.

The practical payoff is concrete: a short IT sprint that surfaces one robust pilot and the cloud/edge plumbing to scale it can be the difference between fragmented experiments and company‑wide productivity gains already visible in Italian large firms' results.

Italian IT teams must treat the EU AI Act as an operational roadmap, not just a legal checkbox: start by mapping whether the organisation is a provider, deployer or downstream modifier of models (the rules can reach non‑EU firms that place models on the EU market), then build a compliance pack that covers technical documentation, a copyright policy, a public training‑data summary and post‑market monitoring with logging and human‑oversight rules - remember model documentation and many records must be retained for up to ten years and downstream providers need timely access to information.

Key milestones matter for planning: prohibitions and basic AI‑literacy duties applied from 2 February 2025, GPAI‑specific transparency, copyright and safety obligations took effect on 2 August 2025 (with a two‑year grace window for legacy models), and broader high‑risk rules and enforcement phases follow through 2026–2027, so IT should prioritise secure data pipelines, incident‑reporting channels, and an auditable risk‑management framework now while tracking national authority designations in Italy (a May 2024 proposal points to ACN and AgID) and the European AI Office guidance; practical help and timelines are summarised on the EU AI Act implementation timeline and the national implementation tracker, while legal briefings outline the latest enforcement and penalty mechanics to budget for compliance work.

"The AI Act entered into force on 1 August 2024."

Italian retail IT teams must treat AI risk management as a continuous engineering discipline: start by vetting third‑party suppliers for robust data governance, documented incident‑response plans and rights to audit, and insist on clear model documentation so decision flows are explainable and defensible - contract clauses should require updates, audit reports and access to bias and performance testing.

Mitigating bias means auditing training data, insisting on diverse datasets and running fairness KPIs (accuracy, precision/recall plus ethical metrics) so models don't inadvertently discriminate; don't forget that generative models can “hallucinate” or invent outputs, so validate any customer‑facing assistant before it touches production.

Use explainability tools and human‑in‑the‑loop controls to balance model complexity with regulatory transparency, and instrument continuous monitoring for data drift and performance degradation so retraining triggers are automated rather than ad hoc.

For third‑party AI, probe provenance of training data, ask for proof‑of‑concepts and require contractual obligations for compliance with emerging EU norms; practical checklists and supplier‑risk frameworks adapted from financial‑sector guidance are directly applicable to retail IT. For operational help on third‑party risk and practical controls, review Wolters Kluwer guidance on third‑party AI risk management and Styrk research on AI explainability and bias mitigation to build a repeatable, auditable process that keeps models reliable and customers protected.

Italy's IT teams must treat skills and organisation as mission‑critical: from 2 February 2025 the EU AI Act requires providers and deployers to ensure AI literacy across staff, contractors and partners, so start by mapping roles and risk levels, then deliver role‑specific training, keep records and appoint a central AI compliance lead to coordinate audits and procurement.

Pragmatic options range from free or public modules listed in the EU's living repository of AI literacy programmes to compact commercial e‑learning - for example, PwC's Italian AI Literacy course is a 1.5‑hour, interactive module (priced from €110 per user) that tracks participation for compliance - and specialist providers (QA, Simmons‑Simmons briefs and sector workshops) can supply deeper technical tracks for IT, DevOps and model‑ops teams.

Funding here is often operational: treat training budgets as insurance against liability and as a scaling enabler by combining short mandatory modules with targeted hands‑on upskilling for data engineers and platform owners; document everything so that when a regulator or buyer asks for proof of competence, the IT lead can open a neat training ledger showing who completed what before models went live.

For practical guidance, see SER's briefing on mandatory AI literacy, PwC Italy AI Literacy course details, and the EU AI literacy programs repository.

“skills, knowledge and understanding that allow providers [...], taking into account their respective rights and obligations [...] to make an informed deployment of AI systems, as well as to gain awareness about the opportunities and risks of AI and possible harm it can cause.”

Conclusion and next steps for retail IT leaders in Italy in 2025 are pragmatic and urgent: treat AI as a capacity-building program, not a gadget - start by converting strategic intent into two parallel streams (fast pilots and durable foundations).

Prioritise pilots that prove clear ROI (computer‑vision shelf monitoring or a Shopic smart‑cart trial that bridges physical and digital checkout) and pair each with measurable KPIs, rollback controls and a data‑plumbing plan so successes scale; see concrete pilot momentum in PAC 2000A Conad's pilot of Shopic's AI‑powered Smart Cart pilot.

Use national levers - Italy's 2024–2026 AI strategy opens funding and shared datasets to accelerate SME adoption - and align roadmaps to the market reality that 63% of large Italian firms are adopting or planning AI with an estimated €115 billion productivity upside (Minsait); read the Minsait findings at Artificial Intelligence in Italy 2025: adoption, impacts and prospects.

Close the skills gap by combining short compliance and AI‑literacy modules with hands‑on, role‑specific training - practical classroom-to‑pilot training such as the Nucamp AI Essentials for Work bootcamp syllabus equips non‑technical staff to write prompts, run pilots and sustain deployments - while formalising vendor risk, monitoring and EU compliance as ongoing IT responsibilities.

In short: pick one high‑impact pilot, fund the data plumbing and training, document governance for auditors, and scale only the repeatable wins.

“Thanks to AI solutions, stores automatically track product availability on shelves and find optimal placement for them. Computer vision detects theft instances and immediately alerts staff. Intelligent systems analyse customer movement through the store and their preferences, which prevents overstocking and increases sales volumes,” explains the IBA Group expert.